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Taxi!

By Deborah Yaffe, Jul 27 2017 01:00PM

I marked the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death last week in rather prosaic fashion: giving my house an all-too-infrequent thorough cleaning, while listening to a new audio adaptation of Northanger Abbey.

The cleaning was, as ever, tedious and tiring. The adaptation – a made-for-Audible version headlined by Emma Thompson as the narrator, or, as the credits would have it, as “Jane Austen” – was quite delightful.

It’s an exhaustively complete, scrupulously faithful six-hour version, which allows room for lots of the narratorial voiceover that so seldom makes it into Austen adaptations. We get to hear Thompson read the famous defense of the novel and remark dryly, “A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, must conceal it as well as she can.” The other actors, some of them well-known to American audiences and others less so, are also excellent.

If only I had realized that, while I was lugging my vacuum cleaner up and down the stairs to the accompaniment of Henry Tilney’s witticisms, London Janeites were enjoying the recording in style.

Turns out that for seven hours on July 18 – the Austen bicentenary and the release date of the adaptation – Audible offered free rides through the streets of London in so-called “Austen taxis”: carriages pulled by matched pairs of horses and piloted by coachmen in Georgian dress. (More pictures here.) Along the way, the lucky customers who signed up for these elegant commutes listened to excerpts from the NA adaptation.

Sounds quite lovely, doesn’t it? (Assuming, of course, that your coachman was more Henry Tilney than John Thorpe.) I think I would willingly have traded my clean kitchen floor for a ride in an Austen taxi.